Rumi

First comes knowledge,
then the doing of the job. And much later,
perhaps after you're dead, something grows
from what you've done.

This quote makes me smile:

Don't look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don't milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don't walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT.

I love the offbeat way he splits his phrasings at odd angles, jangled with the punctuation. His words remain powerful some 800 years after they were written. That (I'm going to go ahead and assume) is what he means by doing the job. It's not just a work-a-day make your money and get out kind of deal this work, this job worth doing. The job that we all should be doing. Creating something that lasts beyond our own selves and lives. That's what's worth striving for. The transformation of transcendant emanations. Or something. Anyway, I like Rumi. In the right frame of mind, he can really open up corridors of being that are quite lovely and wondrous.

Anyway again, this is a quote from the editors' description from a collection of R's stuff. It explains a kind of part of a sufi spiritual cosmology. It's a cool idea and one that fits well with my own (novel) project.

One sufi image of the lines of transmission (silsila) is a great branching rosebush that grows elegantly on many levels and within several worlds at once. Initiation and guidance come through the saints and keep the present moment dynamic and quivering with new growth. Majesty is that composite attention felt as a presence, dawn, a company of friends, a splendor that is prior to, and the source of, the universe. Rumi says it is a state of awareness best spoken of in terms of what it is not.